Blonder crossed the highway and walked up to a Maple Hills policeman standing by the gate. Another Maple Hills officer sidled up to join them, his right hand resting lightly on the pistol holstered by his side. Blonder said something to the first policeman;the officer touched the tunic radio clipped to his epaulet and spoke into it. A minute later, the officer motioned for Blonder to go in.
Just then, a sudden gust of fire shot up, and for an instant, the very top of the dark gray roofline of Amanda’s house stood bright in silhouette against the orange sky, a few hundred feet from the center of the fire. I took a breath, relieved. The air coming in from Agent Other’s open window in front was acrid and stank of a chemical fire.
I leaned forward on the backseat and tried to sound calm. “Can’t you tell me any thing?” I asked Other.
Other didn’t take his eyes off the fire across the highway. “Agent Till called for us to pick you up and bring you here.”
“How about we get out and stand by the car?”
He grunted a no. I gave up and watched the flames poke at the sky. For thirty minutes, they raged higher and higher, showing no signs of diminishing. Then Agent Blonder came out of the entrance, crossed the street, and opened my car door.
“Agent Till would like to speak with you now, sir.”
I went with Blonder across the closed highway to the gate. The Maple Hills officer stood aside, and we went in.
To the right, both sides of Chanticleer Circle were lined, bumper to bumper, with fire trucks, ambulances, Maple Hills police cars, and two dark Crown Victorias. We moved down the center of the street, past the lot where the Farraday house had been, to the curve.
To the left, a dozen firemen in yellow slickers wrestled big tan hoses like giant pythons, aiming streams of water into the flaming pile. The roof and the walls were gone, but I remembered the house. It had been one of the largest in Gateville, a redbrick, gray-roofed Victorian, with at least five bedrooms, a four-car garage, and a solarium off to one side. Now it was a mound of burning wood and smoking bricks.
People from the surrounding houses stood on their lawns, watching the firemen and the police. One pointed at me.
Farther around the curve, Amanda’s house loomed in the glare of the fire, pulsing red from the flashing lights sweeping across its arched windows and massive walnut front doors.
Agent Till, wearing khakis and a beige button-down shirt, stood with Stanley Novak on Amanda’s driveway. They were talking to a dark-haired young man in a Crystal Waters security uniform. Though the August night was hot, superheated by the fire, Stanley wore a flannel shirt. He looked cold.
Till spotted Blonder and me and motioned for us to come up. Stanley’s eyes never left the face of the young security guard. Till turned back to the guard. “Tell me again,” he said.
The young guard rocked on his feet, side to side. “There was no warning. One minute everything’s quiet as a graveyard, the next second there’s a fireball in the sky, followed by a huge boom.”
“You’re certain nobody ran out just before the explosion?” Till asked.
“Not through the main gate,” the guard said. “And we’ve got four men on perimeter, watching the walls. They didn’t see anybody, either.”
Till turned to look at the fire across the street. “Damn it.”
“At least no one was hurt,” Stanley said.
The guard turned to look at him, his eyes wide. “The family was home, Mr. Novak.”
Till spun around. “You said the house was dark.”
“I meant they were asleep,” the guard said.
Stanley’s pale face froze in the flash of the red lights. “No. Check the sheet. They went to Door County for the week, left us a phone number for their place up there.”
The young guard shook his head. “They came back, Mr. Novak. The father, the mother, and the two little girls.”
“Impossible,” Stanley said. “I made my last round at eight. They weren’t home.”
“They got back a couple hours after you left. One of the girlshad the flu, so they came home early.” The young man’s mouth trembled, and he looked away.
Stanley stared at the guard and then made a horrible churdling noise from deep in his throat. He pushed past me to run to two paramedics standing next to an idling ambulance.
“Did you get them out?” he screamed, grabbing one E.M.T. by the shoulders. “Did you get them out?”
The medical technician jerked his arms up and grabbed Stanley’s wrists, yelling back that there was no chance of survivors. Stanley struggled, unhearing, trying to wrest himself free of the man’s grip. Suddenly, he sagged and fell to his knees. “Shit, shit, shit,” he sobbed. “Shit, shit, shit.”
I ran over to him and put my hand under his elbow. “Come on, Stanley.” I tried to pull him up. He was dead weight.
Till and Blonder came over and, together, we half-carried, halfdragged Stanley away, down Chanticleer toward the guardhouse. He fought us, incoherent, alternately mumbling, then yelling for someone to go into the rubble. At the guardhouse, the guard at the console helped us get Stanley to his desk chair in the back office. Till and I sat down in the metal side chairs across from the desk. Blonder stood in the doorway, right behind me.
Stanley slumped in his chair and looked, unseeing, across the desk.
“Stanley? What did you mean about the family being not supposed to be home?” Till asked.
Stanley’s face tightened. He turned and reached for a clipboard hanging on the cinder-block wall behind him, moving his arm like it weighed a hundred pounds. “We have this sheet,” he said in a slow, dull voice. He took the clipboard down and dropped it onto the black plastic desktop. “The Members tell us when they’ll be gone, so we can keep extra watch…” His voice faltered.
“They were dead at the first blast, Stanley,” I said. “The paramedics couldn’t have done a thing.”
Stanley looked out the window, towards the inferno at the west end of Chanticleer Circle. His face was slack, devoid of expression. “Bastards,” he said.
I looked at Till, wondering if they had somehow learned that more than one person was involved. Till’s face was a blank.
“Let’s give him some time, Elstrom,” Till said, standing up. I followed him out of Stanley’s office. He led me to a quiet space by one of the pillars. Blonder came along, five feet back.
Till turned around. In the glare of the entry lights, I wondered how old he really was. Whatever his age, by the depth of the lines etched in his face, the years had been hard. I didn’t want to imagine what it must be like, trying to sleep with a head full of crazies carrying bombs and guns. It took far less than that to send me up to the roof of the turret in the middle of the night.
“Where were you last night, Elstrom?”
“Asleep. Ask your boys.”
Till looked past me at Blonder. “You think he was asleep?”
“Come on, Till.”
“I don’t know, sir,” Blonder responded. “Mr. Elstrom spends a lot of time on his roof in the middle of the night, and we can’t really see him up there. He could have been awake.”
“Watching the sky, waiting, Elstrom?”
“Jesus, Till.”
“But he’d been inside all night?” Till asked, still looking at Blonder.
“There’s only the front door. We had that covered,” Blonder said.
I stepped in front of Blonder so Till would have to look at me. “What are you saying?”
Till looked at me. “Like I told you before, motive and means. You’ve got both. You’re broke. You have a real attitude about this place. And you were left alone in your ex-wife’s house for almost a month before getting tossed out. You had plenty of time to plant a few bombs.”
“We’ve done this before, Till. It’s just as weak the second time around.”